Vampire in the Banyan Tree

Doctor Spetulese

In the cities of the Circle, illuminated by the disciplined energies of the Great Order, working through their artificers - or even in some of the lands of the Shamalyn Earth, where the beam of the First Planet is so occluded that orderly electrons can be made to flow along wire to brighten filaments inside glass bulbs - the citizens can expect to live their lives in the convenience of ready light. They forget, being generations removed, of the great hold darkness has on the human imagination.

In the capitol of the Swampland Kingdom, all was dark. Although torches burned on the greater buildings and the avenues, they merely outlined the schematic of the city without exposing detail. Fires glowed in the street corner braziers, sending up sparks and, here and there, illumination spilled from public houses, leavened by drunken figures. In the mazes, watchmen strolled, with lanterns that held little more usefulness than to keep their boots from the manure.

The palace loomed above the rooftops like a monstrous sea shell. The citadel, generally called The Embarcarion, was an artifact of the ancient world, a fortress so impregnable and wondrous that it had generated an entire country around itself. However, what could be seen of it, in these present circumstances, was yielded only by the faintest glow from the city below, grading the curving walls to a shade above black.

The nightmen were generally bored. Law and order was fairly good. The citizens, in the ancient tradition of those parts, went about everywhere armed, and were not above beating or stabbing a thief to death if called upon. People, by their rough standards, were prosperous, and those prone to starvation had mostly gotten on with it during the civil war. But it was dark. A man could step into an alley and think himself struck blind, nervously striking a spark from the flint in his knife handle to reassure himself.

'Six bells and all's well!' called a voice from the walls, but respectable people heard it in their beds.

***

Doctor Spetulese stood at the base of one of the great, stag-carved pillars that flanked the outer throne room. There were twenty seven of them, half the size of the nine even greater pillars that held up the roof of the inner chamber. The Doctor was not blind. He could tell, because several of the shapes that were currently menacing to him were faintly visible against some vague effulgence in the atmosphere. A torch burning, perhaps, in some nearby corridor. Although they were only on the borders of the inner sanctum, it was already oppressively hot. The upper reaches of the palace were heated by some ancient mechanism in the walls that nobody understood or was able to turn off. In better times, it had been customary to open the windows to the wind. These days, the King preferred them closed.

         'I hear no sound,' whispered the first of the shapes, standing a little too close for the doctor's comfort. A mouth-breathing voice, economical with its sentences, scant in its air. That was the High Holy, Pusp.

         'Perhaps he is asleep,' replied another. That, by the narrowness of its skull and the unicorn-like horn emerging from the top of it (being the chief ornamentation of the ridiculous Enderiam-style military helmet he insisted on wearing), was General Hortenze.

         'Have none entered since the first bell?' asked Pusp.

         'None but that other,' whispered Hortenze.

Now a third voice spoke, from a source invisible, smooth and reasonable, kind, even. It was the voice of labyrinth. 'Perhaps the good doctor can assay some investigation on our behalf,' it suggested. 'With our gratitude'.

Spetulese shuddered. Emanating from some unseen alcove in the gloom, the third speaker had heretofore given no indication of his presence, but Spetulese had known he was there. He was always there. Of the three, the wheezing priest, the bellicose general, it was this last that he hated the most, the Chief Councillor, Malefluent. These three, together, constituted the real rulers of the Swampland Kingdom. They were known, popularly, as The Underlings.

         'Yes, make yourself useful,' growled Hortenze, 'instead of trembling here like a rabbit.'

Spetulese might have pointed out that if he was trembling here like a rabbit, he wasn't alone. The 'other' mentioned by Hortenze was a servant who had entered, four hours ago, with the King's repast, and failed to emerge. Perhaps the two were in conversation. Spetulese doubted it. The King did not have much of a common touch these days.

         It's dark, he thought, and meant it existentially.

Spetulese clenched his hands upon each other until they steadied, feeling his surgeon's fingers, long and exquisitely trained. Sometimes, he wondered if he was being punished for the conceit of believing himself chosen to relieve the suffering of the human race, whether God, having gone to such lengths to make the world a chaotic and terrifying place, held little patience for the do-gooders who went around trying to show him up. I'm going to die here, he sometimes confessed to the liquor, alone in the heart of the great palace. When the King expired, the Underlings would roll him down the Avenue of Tombs, in a barrel filled with inward-pointing nails. A just fate for the poisoner of their beloved monarch. Of course, he knew that this was a threat they'd made to prevent him forming any notion of actually poisoning his patient. After the king was dead, there'd be no need to carry it out.

But it didn't matter. They'd do it anyway. His life was worthless.

In a minute they'd make him go into the throne room looking for the King. What he dreaded was that it might be truly dark in there, cave-black. He'd be forced to edge forward, like a blind man trying to find a cliff's edge, not daring to call out, not daring to strike a light, for fear of suddenly seeing what the darkness had been gestating.

In the childhood of distant memory, on the banks of a river that served a great city, he had been the son of a government clerk. His family was without connections but his father was hard-working and he a good student. And he had a talent.

He remembered the grey morning when he had stood at the Selection, when the representatives of the Peerless Order called the children of the towns and far districts out of their houses to be assessed. Some parents hid their children, he'd never understood that. Who wouldn't want to wear the blue of the Great Order, one of the pillars which held up the world? Who wouldn't want to be educated more superbly than any bursar or plutocrat's son? So he'd stood, amongst his peers, excitement vibrating up from the soles of his feet, convinced, without evidence, that the world had some purpose for him. It did, although it was not to wear the blue. The testing machines made his head ache but nothing else. However, he was not dismissed. The haughty men paused to confer, speaking in gibberish above his head. He was pulled from the herd, standing not with the selected ones - who were already developing the lifelong smirk of destiny's favored vessels - but directed into the secondary lines for further assessment. In a darkened tent he was made to count glowing pyramids and spheres that glimmered into view, concentrating, in his childish seriousness, in getting the numbers and colours right. Only later did he realise that the test was to see them at all.

'The boy tests high for spectral sensitivity on the seventh, fifth and eleventh bands,' a cold man told his bewildered parents. Then they put him in a wagon and he never saw his family again.

He was surprised, later, at how much he missed them. But that was a long time ago.

Get on with it. Don't let them force you. Keep some dignity.

         'I will enter and inquire as to his Majesty's disposition,' he said, and was pleased at the cool tone he managed. Take that, bastards. Without waiting for reply, he turned and pushed into the heavy curtain.

It was sometimes hard to find the gap in the velvets that held the inner chamber in their smothering grip, and he wasn't exactly sure where he was starting. Engulfed, he held his breath against the musk, trying not to sneeze out the smell of old rugs and threadbare moth-food, feeling, revoltingly, things flutter against his face. He ducked his head and pushed harder, for a moment, it seemed they would resist, but then his arm grouped out an edge and he forced himself through.

The heavy cloth parted, falling, with soft weight, to either side. Foul air came through, but no light, he was staring into nothing. Momentarily, he thought his worst fear had been realized, but then his outstretched fingers found cloth again and he understood that he was standing behind the second line of drapes that hung inside the first. They formed a sort of uneven corridor, along which one could grope. The curtains could not be lifted, he'd tried that before, it was like fighting a velvet octopus, and he had a visceral loathing of the foul dust and vermin that such efforts aroused, so he pressed on, trying to hold his breath and looking for any gleam that would indicate a gap. On no account was Spetulese tempted to remove the round spectacles of thick, darkened glass he wore. The glass of the lenses were treated with unulinum, which blocked all spectral radiences. Without them, he would have been able to see, even in the blackness, by the residual energies that permeated all, and especially living, matter, but it may have also made visible other things, presences that had no power but for the horror and pity they inspired.

The doctor's grateful eyes finally registered light- a timid, vertical flicker, between the folds. He passed through and stood on the threshold of the great throne room, the political heart of the Swampland Kingdom.

The illumination, emitting from some unseen place at the far end, threw up towering shadows, turning the place into an ogre's cavern. The ceiling was high, supported by twenty massive pillars, coiled about themselves like serpents, magnificently carved with processionals of trees and animals, gods and devils, men and women, struggling together in war and passion, intertwined and ever ascending, upwards into darkness, their faces deep-cut and sinister in the light. A revolting reek hung in the air, fecund and suffocating, made worse by the heat. The miasma generated from something more than the discarded food, rotting in the chamber's recesses amongst the rats. There was something else, the spiritual filth of human degradation. It was the odor of the slum, the madhouse, the lost and ruined, and its hand was heavy.

King Cutburt the Giant Killer had sequestered himself in his throne room for a decade and a half, descending from the daylight world into his own stygian hell, where he lingered, barely, upon the final ledge above the abyss. Though the doctor struggled to arrest them, the King's physical maladies had advanced, against all resources, an inch at a time. When he passed out, worn down by some frenzy, or drunk beyond consciousness, Spetulese made what treatments he could, sometimes assisted by one of the braver servants, each but another inconclusive battle in the long retreat.

Now he could see a new addition to the general filth, one no more pleasant for its novelty, lying a dozen yards inside the room. As Spetulese crept closer, enough light collected to confirm the indistinct lump as the missing servant. No surprises there. The body was face down, there were flies crawling on its exposed brain matter, the collar was black with dried blood. Contusion of the rear anterior skull, exposing the cerebellum, Spetulese noted, involving probable penetration of bone fragments. Conclusion: fatal. Good work, doctor, another timely diagnosis. A few feet away was the murder weapon, judging by the hair clotted on its rim, a large pewter serving dish.

Spetulese wondered how much force was needed to split a man's skull with a blunt edge. Enough to serve as a reminder, if he needed one, to approach their beloved liege with caution.

Spetulese advanced silently, passing the sad remains - does that man have a family? Why does no one seem to care? - careful not to place his shoe on anything that might crack or crunch. The king was in here somewhere, and he responded unpredictably to sudden or irritating noises.

Spetulese was now passing the War Table. This had held pride of place in the great chamber since time immemorial. Here, gorgeously carved in a naive style that was both artful yet pagan, was the entire kingdom in miniature, the firelight picking out the contours of its glossy wood. The War Table was immense and, even in these sinister shadows, beautiful. Depicted was every mountain pass and hillock, every ridge and serpentine river of the land, in unearthly accuracy and detail.

The swampland was a great basin, ringed by mountains. This space had filled with sediment, in the long ages since the flood, and settled into a sodden plain of marsh and fen, rippled here and there, with ridges of higher ground. Spetulese, assuming he had not had other things on his mind, could have imagined himself a bird traversing the span of the King's half-wild dominion. Here were the deltas, fanning past the southern opening to the sea, where the arms of the mountains declined to the sea. Here, amidst the shifting estuaries and sand bars, were the three permanent sea settlements, Haven, to the west, the only one with a useful harbor, Sealhearth, mouth of rivers and root of the Campestral's trunk, and finally The Spit.

It was onto this last that Spetulese had been delivered, twenty years before, with his shivering and shipwrecked companions. He still retained vivid memory of sea water filling his boots, his legs turning to noodles at the feeling of solidity under them and, making a virtue of necessity, falling to his knees to kiss the sand. He remembered the grit, the taste of salt and, getting to his feet, feeling more alive than he ever had. They had washed up, like flotsam, on a great beach, scoured with sea haze, which receded into a long constellation of little lights from fisherman's fires. He had smelled the tincture of wood smoke and tar and the cold wind off the ocean, it had all seemed impossibly physical, joint-numbing, desperate and exhilarating. Spetulese had become an accidental citizen of a country of which he had never heard, half-pagan and a stranger to itself.

It had been on the very day Cutburt had ascended to the Oak and become king.

He passed on. Northward from Sealhearth, rose the settled strip of land called the Campestral, defended by networks of ancient dikes, which rose, threaded by a central highway called the Old Salt, until it joined with the capitol, which stood at almost the exact centre of the country. When Swamplanders spoke of 'the south', it was this densely settled spine they meant.

From the capitol, three more compass roads went, north, east and west, running to the borders of the country. They were called, respectively, the Pilgrim, Habbage and Vinrest. Since the bridge fell and the Swampland had been cut from the northern pass, the most traveled, and maintained, by far, was the Old Salt, linking the capitol to the sea and the wider world and serving the busy, populated Campestral.

Spetulese's eyes passed over the Immortal Kings, three peaks that marked the descending passes to the Valley of the Meeting Rivers and the passage to the east. He saw a jagged stair rising from the deep fens and wilderness, shrouded in mists and tall forest, the spellbound Corelimads, ancient, mystic heart of the land. Beyond them lay traceries fed by glaciers, rising, eventually, to impassable plateaus of ice and snow, the abode of giants and other monsters, from under which flowed cold rivers, through deep caverns and hidden reaches.

To the west, the Habbage begin to wander, after running straight for so long, and rose in steppes until it expired at the feet of the ruins of a great wall, which choked off the western mountain bottleneck, sealing the approach from the swamp basin while making little attempt to conquer it. This marked the furthest known southern extension of the Pyramid Builders, the shadow of the monster to the north, the Savant Empire, the Slaves of Dinn, tumultuous well of chaos and calamities, great faith of the second continent, which had once surged like a tide from the inner sea to the farthest West, breaking its armies like waves upon the nations of the earth, upon ramparts of the Walled Land itself, before falling back into fanaticism, schism, self-mutilation and anarchy. From Oomaloor, that vast capitol, near to which no traveler could venture without being seized and dragged in chains, emanated the breath of the Great Northern Continent, a fanatical menace and mindless progenitor of armies.

Across the wall, an ancient track headed west into deep desert. A caravan came down it no more than once every hundred years.

A casual observer might consider the War Table no more than a beautiful piece of topographical art, but it had strange and useful properties. There had been, originally, three hundred and three game pieces for the table, each a carved figurine of a human or animal, and each corresponding to an identical brother piece. When one of the twin pieces was placed on the board, it moved, by some strange, sympathetic magnetism, in correspondence to it sibling, out in the actual country. The War Table thus made an invaluable asset to any ruler. By handing out pieces to his generals, spies or subjects, their movements could be transmitted unerringly back to the throne room. This, of course, often lent itself to treachery. Of the original three hundred and three figurines, only thirty remained, that had not been destroyed or lost their counter-piece.

Spetulese approached the end of the great table. There was a dark mass of clutter further on, piled chairs and furniture, sheeted with heavy tapestries that had not been moved for a decade. Beyond this dark maze, the light, still unseen, burned. Above that, loomed the throne of the Swampland kingdom, a great oak trunk, set on its side, with its bark unremoved, but its top polished to the underwood to form a seat. The great tree had been the ancient heart of the old religion, around which the priestesses of the moon had circled, in the time before the sea people came with their tall ships and iron tools. Its destruction had meant the scattering of the old faith and the end of the rule of women. Above it, far up on the wall, almost invisible in the dimness, a single great, sheathed sword was mounted, the Krysloch.

Spetulese now trod with the most exquisite care, like a man approaching the den of a dangerous beast.

Suddenly he heard a voice, that sent his heart thumping, a muttering, harsh and sepulchral.

         'As long as it never goes out. As long as it never goes out..' it was muttering, and Spetulese was startled to realise one of the humped shapes in that darkened clutter was the king. He was sitting, staring into the flame of a single lamp, that burned upon a small table.

         'Your m-m-,' quavered Spetulese with dry lips. He hated his traitor body. Some men were able to hide their fear and thus be accounted brave, but his tongue jumped over his words, his knees felt like to buckle and the sweat clammied his brow with an unlovely sheen. Knowing how he sounded, got the better of himself. 'Your majesty?' He called out.

         'Who!' barked the shape.

         'Your physician, Majesty. Spetulese. Doctor Spetulese. Wondered if he could humbly inquire as to your Majesty’s health.'

         'Oh' came the voice, indifferently. 'Have a seat, Doctor. By all means have a seat.'

Not knowing if that was sarcasm, Spetulese took a few steps into the light, but didn't sit. It was more prudent to be on one's toes anyway, in case the King decided to shed his boozy camaraderie and add another corpse to the floor.

Cutburt had never been beautiful but he'd been a rock to his people. He'd assumed the leadership when his father died and consolidated the succession with accidental effectiveness. The bitter feelings of the civil war had somewhat lapsed, in unity against an existential terror, the so-called Serpent Queen, but his father had managed all that and all Cutburt had to do, when he took the throne, was to not screw up to badly, not antagonize the bruised populace, and to present an effective deterrent to the usual pests and menaces that hedged civilization's fold.

His character was not his father's. He was uncomfortable when confined indoors. It was generally held by his officials that forcing new information into the young king's head was pointless, since it only forced old information out. The best way to get anything done was to present him with degrees to stamp in passing, knowing that he would read none of them. However, power abhors the same thing nature does, and the daily sight of an empty throne soon began to exert an unhealthy influence on some inside the palace. Inevitably, certain bureaucrats and opportunists began passing off their own agendas as the crown's but, as the new ruler had a habit of holding underlings to the spirit of his instruction rather than the letter – and lopping heads off either way – they soon learned to desist, and a crude balance between the regulatory state and its semi-absconded monarch was established.

For a while, all had gone well. Unlike his father, who had spent his time in the capitol immersed in schematics and projects, Cutburt spent his time splendidly ranging from one end of the country to the other, at the head of a travelling carnival of hunting, fighting, drinking and fornicating men and women. He reflected, in these exploits, the general appetites of his people and thus won them over. He took, as was his right, the King's Piece from the War Table, a figurine carved in the shape of a man with a crown of antlers, and the legislators and petitioners were left to languish in the capitol, watching the crowned piece range about the carved landscape as he went from the hospitality of one petty lord to the next.

Today, the King's piece still ranged about the war table, but no one knew who held its counterpart. It had been missing for seventeen years, the night of the death of Cutburt's third queen, the mother of Aleron and his twin sister, Hyacinth.

Now Spetulese could see the King more clearly. The reasons none of his features could be read in silhouette was because his form was shrouded by a heavy cloth, draped about him like a filthy monk's habit, hiding his face and body.

Spetulese approached no closer. Weary years of experience with King Cutburt's maudlin frenzies had habituated him to tactical placement. He had become adept at appearing close enough to lend a sympathetic ear without seeming to place a heavy object of furniture or loose rug between him and his patient.

         'Will the sun never rise?' the shrouded bulk muttered.

For a moment, the doctor wondered if the King understood the throne room was sealed. He had the eerie thought that the man had lost his mind entirely, that he believed the long years to be one delirium, a single, terrible, unending night. The idea was so horrible, in his present state of mind, that he had to force it away before it unnerved him. But no, surely, Cutburt wasn't that far gone.

         'All I see in her is her mother, the whore and poisoner. And that witch.'

         'Yes, your majesty' said Spetulese, discerning, from context, that the King's daughter was now the topic of conversation. He tried to see the king's face, but could make nothing out under the cowl and filthy hair than the glitter of lamplight off the deep eyes.

         'So she is to be given. That's her purpose, we all have one. They'd have killed me and ruled my son between them, but I tell you doctor-' this said with deceptive calm- 'no cunt will ever sit with command on the sacred oak!' At these last words, with sudden explosive rage, he sent a the pewter flask he'd been nursing flying at the looming throne. It clattered and crashed into the darkness. Spetulese swallowed. The heavy shape stumbled, and the fury dimmed. One foot came down, heavily, on a wooden drinking cup, breaking it with an unpleasantly bone-like crack. 'We're not so far gone,' he muttered.

         'Yes, your majesty,' replied Spetulese in a tone he hoped was supportive to whatever sentiment was being expressed, whether skepticism of gynocracy or satisfaction at the Almighty's malevolence, he couldn't tell.

The king picked up his lamp and paced past the doctor, who moved back to give him a wide berth.

Cutburt put his hands on the War Table, leaning heavily, his face lost in the filthy hair hanging in long growth from his heavy cowl. 'All virtue is in men, Spetulese' he rumbled, 'To women is given all that is treacherous, deceiving and false. For my daughter's part, better she never become one.'

         'And yet she cannot be entirely base, your Majesty,' replied the doctor, knowing he could only reply with so many yes, your Majesties before it got on the King's nerves, 'for some aspect of her father's virtue is reflected in her, even as an imperfect vessel.'

The King turned on him, and the look at blazed out under that filthy fringe of dark cloth was pure murder. Spetulese couldn't help stepping back, his heart thumping. He'd thought himself on safe ground with some empty flattery of the king's virility, but there was no way of predicting what would touch the fuse. The man was raging, battering the cage invisible, and, if sometimes the fire choked down in the smoke, it was ever ready to flash back. Get the conversation off his daughter you idiot!

         'A-are- is- your majesty ready, to, to, ah, for his medicine? stammered the physician.

For a long moment, the only sound he could hear was the other's harsh breathing and the beating of his own heart. Then the fire seemed to fade. 'Medicine,' said the king, thickly. 'What do you have for the soul, quack?'

There was no answer to this, and it wasn't really a question anyway, so the doctor remained silent, feeling the sweat gather in his clothes, hating beyond all possibility, the wretched, fecund heat and the vile reek of the air. Buried alive. The king turned back to his wooden kingdom.

In his darker moments, the doctor had become convinced that something was keeping Cutburt alive, long past the point where disease and drink should have done him in. Something that was more than his native obstinacy, or the lingering trace of his boarish stamina, something that could not be detected with a physician's instruments. In the hour before the dawn, he could almost feel it, beating with them, in the darkness, like a heart, a serpent coiled in a well, a premonition of disaster rising from uneasy sleep, the secret that wasn't a secret, the damnation of the King and the salvation of his people, the deal done in the belly of the Smoking Mountain, fifteen years previous.

On nights like that, it seemed as if the sun would never rise again. Yet it did, and he put such thoughts away. The man was sick, that was all. It was a doctor's responsibility to care only for the body - one of the scanty blessings that leavened his grim acre - and leave the soul to the priests.

         'Sometimes I have a nightmare that light went out,' said Cutburt, staring at his flickering lamp, 'while I slept. I awake alone, in a great darkness.'

         You are alone, in a great darkness, thought the doctor.

         'It will never go out, your Majesty,' said Spetulese.

Spetulese stared at the robed figure, trying to gauge its state of health. With reluctance, he pulled the blocking spectacles down his nose and looked over them. Immediately the room seemed to brighten beyond the limit of the visible spectrum, the far recesses of the mighty chamber becoming a field of deep blues, subtly picked out by ray-like expositors of lighter tones. Diffused slightly though the cloth of his robe, he saw the king's living mechanisms, glowing in warmer colours, the elegant nimbus of organs, the infinite delicacies of his circulatory system, sluggish, occluded by disease. The body light burned low, the line of energy that ascended the spine along the six transmetic points to the brain, was erratic, pulsing weakly with the breathing, like a blown-upon ember. The lungs dimmed to green and murky yellow, diffusing into sodden regions of poor definition. The arteries still glowed a little brighter, a tracery pulsing faintly against the darker regions. He replaced the glasses.

In the seventh year of his rule, Cutburt killed the giant Rumlamb, an event that finally brought him out of his father's shadow and gave him a name of his own.

Rumlamb wasn't a big, as giants go, and he may have been very slightly retarded, but he was a giant nonetheless. Purists in the heroism department might claim that one can not entirely be said to have defeated a foe in single combat after one's companions have driven dozens of arrows and lances through his body, but any close combat with a giant is no joke. Most of the Cutburt's companions received wounds and broken bones, six footmen were killed. Teram of Wolf Hill lost an eye, the king got himself a fractured collar bone and his horse killed beneath him, but it was he, swinging a double-handed sword, that dealt the blow that finally sent the great head rolling. They brought it back to the city and put the it up on the gate for the admiration of the populace, the eyes staring, the slack mouth full of maggots, and the people cheered and called Hail, hail, Cutburt the Giant Killer, and called him such from that day on. Spetulese remembered. He remembered feeling how strange it was to be caught up in the emotion of other people, and how powerful, and delightful it was, to feel their vindicated blood-lust at the king's latest victim. They'd all pressed to the windows of the public house and seen the great head paraded above the crowd like a harvest god, and whooped and bought rounds and had his back slapped by drunken strangers.

By then, the king had gone through two wives in short order, and his southern subjects were not eager to give him a third to knock on the head or wall up. He had also picked up an array of venereal diseases that kept Spetulese in consultation and distracted him from the college of medicine he was establishing under Cutburt's patronage. Pennants from the field of honour, the King bragged, but his physician was not so enthused. Cutburt might seem to think that sores and lesions on his member were no more than tokens of summer nights well spent, but some of the things that had taken up residence were not so benign. Two, especially, were difficult to eradicate. The first was the so-called 'Blue lotus,' known for showing itself in glossy, blue-bruise lesions upon the skin in its early stages, then advancing to rot away eyes and sinuses. It had the habit of twisting its host's nervous system into torsions and ribbinous hallucinations. Madness and dementia proceeded, as it tightened its grip, softening and engorging the blood vessels until they burst, and carried the sufferer away by merciful apoplexy or stroke. The second was Ezuzzlian Leprosy, also called 'Sailor's rot', which had come into the country from the north, along the caravan routs. This latter could sink deep into the liver and remain dormant for years, only to re-emerge with a vengeance in later life, growing granulated masses of tissue all over the body even as it ate away the skeleton. How Cutburt had managed to get both of these in addition to the regular varieties of pox was a mystery, but then he had frequently boasted of fucking everything female on two legs between the Corelimads and the sea.

With his uncanny vision, Spetulese could see both of these menaces lurking in the soft tissue, but couldn't get a grip on the King long enough for proper treatment. Flooding his patients body with imbued particles in suspension, he could force the aura to brighten enough for him to isolate and burn the abnormalities out of the physical tissue and, although he sent away for the precursor chemicals, he never got the chance to use them. Much as the king loved the novelty of these foreign medical processes (far more interesting than the local recourse of swamp herbs, beatings with holy objects and cursing the Dark One), he was ever itching to get out from under ceilings.

         'Your subjects every day profess their loyalty, your Majesty' said the doctor, not knowing what else to say and casting about for a safe topic of conversation. 'All declare the prince, your son, a paragon in all things.'

         'My son,' said the king. 'I'll keep him here, where they cannot get him. Yes. I'll keep him here.'

Spetulese realised, with alarm, that he had stumbled onto even more dangerous terrain. The princes were not here. Against all custom, they had been sent six days earlier on some sort of tour. Spetulese had assumed the King knew this. It had seemed like such a strange divergence from Malefluent's normal policy, that he had foolishly assumed it was by royal order. For the last fifteen years, the Underlings had coiled around the royal offspring like pythons, excluding all the king's former loyalists, one by one, until they were as much prisoners of this place as he was.

Aleron and Hycanith (along with Hart, an unfortunate bystander due to his status as a high-born hostage), had grown up in the shadowed chambers of the great citadel, strangers to the land they would one day supposedly rule. If they were sent off with Malefluent's authority alone, what did that mean? Spetulese' mind raced in terror. Did the Chief Councillor now fear no one at all? Not even the King? An what did that mean?

         'O-o-of course, your majesty,' he trembled, 'of course, of course. Safe inside these walls! Safe inside- Majesty, here is your tonic. And, and here are your, ah, physics and minerals. All have been prepared.' He set the various vials and tubs out on the splintered wood of one of the benches. Cutburt, however ignored them. The king leaned on the rim of the great, mountainous topography that framed the north of the table and surveyed his land. He did not speak, and Spetulese, thinking it wiser to say nothing, stood quiet.

         'My son..' said the king.

When Cutburt slew Rumlamb, seven years had passed, and seven years is a long time for the royal tree to bear no fruit. To this point, the king had sired mostly stillbirths and monsters with his wives and various conquests. Stunted dwarfish creatures and half-formed things with extra eyes and their spines out of their bodies. This was a property of the Blue Lotus, as his exasperated physician had tried to explain, and not the curses of witches or the wilful obstinacy of his wives, whom he had already skull-bashed and walled up respectively, to teach them not to trifle with the destiny of kings. Inbreeding was also an issue, Spetulese suspecting the limbs of the royal tree of being woven a little too closely together for comfort, but he didn't bring that up.

The king, however, had a theory. To plant his seed in purity! That was the solution. He must have a virgin, and, preferably, one unsullied by the manipulations of their aristocratic families. It was at this time that the North, ever at the King's drunken ear, began to prevail on him to take a northern wife, despite the fact that the peace his father had established was based on the Wettling's fusion by marriage with the southern families and the Sabertines.

It's unknown which fools first suggested he take a Kellimendre girl as his new wife, but they must have done so knowing Cutburt's sense of romantic grandeur would instantly be swept up in the notion. The northern faction suggested the perfect vessel, a golden-haired girl, born under the mists of Elendre Duul, The Horned God's Mountain.

The house of Kellimendre reached all the way back, through fabled antiquity, to the he Swampland's ancient heart. Long displaced in power by southern upstarts, they had retreated into the ranges. Now Cutburt proposed to refresh the royal house with the most mythical and ancient blood, but if there had been cooler heads left to prevail upon him, they would have advised against it. The civil war had ended because a child of both houses, a Sabertine-Wettling, sat on the throne. A northern queen smacked a little too much of the Wettlings being up to their old tricks. Certain loudmouths, in the south, believed they had only lost the war through treachery anyway, and were ever ready for round two. And there were reasons other than political. A pagan taint hung over the Kellimendres. They were uncanny, and everyone knew it.

If he took this girl as a wife, Cutburt might as well have been sticking his cock in gunpowder. That year, flush with victory over the giant, he did it anyway. When the consequences had fully played themselves out, Cutburt would have a new name, one that people spoke behind his back. Perhaps that's why, two years later, he'd engaged in his final and fatal idiocy. He and his companions had gone to the Smoking Mountain, to kill the dragon. And that was that.

That was fifteen years ago.

Spetulese watched the king lean on the War Table, staring out over his shadowed land. In the deep of the north, beneath the sacred mountains, the King's Piece scraped slightly, a sound just barely on the edge of human hearing, as it advanced another tiny degree on its course.

About it, all was darkness.